cut and paste:
find a girl while looking for chorizo
who’ll eat truffle oil pizzas while the weather goes to absolute shit outside
who’ll huddle under your oversized cheapmonday parka with ninja thumbholes
who’ll laugh at the thought of fingers on the back of your neck and in your life and while it was a fun game to play, in a little while you became less than a shadow of a name
had i found the cure to pride, now would be the time to lose it
i mean:
you can sing, sure
you can go on to vancouver and get eyelashes glued on
you can laugh at the tall white guy with donegal fleckled pants and a crumpled hunter green blazer who asks you over for drinks and you straddle him and forget about trying gelato flavours and espresso shots
it’s fine.

cut and paste –
so adored by myself, now what have i to lose?
post it notes dotting the wall next to posters of captain marvel and people standing over a dead cat and a man with a wolf mask
does he know what you’re really up to?

does he know how you’re planning for your death – not because you can’t stand your life or him or that there’s anything wrong in particular but it’s just something that you need to do? which isn’t to say it’s a unique trait you alone have possessed of all the humans who have stepped and fought and died on this tiny rock, or that it isn’t shaped by your parents, friends, newspapers, books advertisements movies music, by society – which is to say that nothing can uniquely define you anyway; if you told him, would he understand?

The season’s chill cracks by the end of May. We walk around the park, past groups of people jogging and stretching and chatting in unison, soundtracked by the spitting fat dripping off burgers and ribs. We walk across the bridge. We walk down the long street peppered by bookstores filled with Fichte and Heidegger; by taco restaurants spilling out their Corona-swigging patrons onto the sidewalk; by shirtless men skateboarding and bared female midriffs. By the time we reach your place, it seems too small for anyone to live in. The walls are thin and transparent where they were once solid buttresses we propped our naked limbs against. I can no longer stand shaving my reflection in the cracked bathroom mirror.

You wipe the sweat from your brow and pull your linen shirt off, and drop it onto the bed, crumpled along with the net of blankets and pillows from last night.

Anything to drink?

Vodka in the freezer.

I know it’s uncomfortable, believe me, I do. But let me have this. We know what’s going to happen anyway, might as well leave with a story to tell.

We used to stare at buildings, waiting for flickers of shadowed movement. It made me feel less alone, all that waiting for people and bringing them into existence. And I guess that’s all I was looking for. Drowning in pools of people and music, drowning in freezing grey goose and lightened thoughts, always on the verge of understanding what the point of all this was but never quite getting there, never putting words to unlinked thoughts. and if i could only put my trembling voice to your face, i could put a shape to the frame, more than anything we’d done, more than we ever could be,

so adored by myself, now what have i to lose?
she didn’t apologize. or say hi, for that matter.
she left during lunch while i reheated last night’s chili.
did it feel strange? seeing her only as typed words trickling across the screen when once she was shared thoughts and dreams, the meaning of closeness and the feeling of living
anyway, she told me not to do it, and then she left and i ate my chili and watched keith floyd and thought, you know, fuck you. who are you to throw my fucking weaknesses at my face after all you did?

but of course in the end, i listened to those last words she said to me, and haven’t heard from her since.

the days were long,
though truthfully only as long as they ever were, i just felt more inclined to complain about them.

i asked you to stay, but you refused, and now that you’re gone, you refuse to leave the corner of my eye while i try to stay awake on trains that pound across the rails to the hospital station, to the mall over the bridge, to places where people eat lunch with their sickly parents and love and die and where they at least feel something on an actual emotional level, and not just talk about how depressed they are.

i held on to the rail. breathed hard. stared down as the wind whipped across my unwashed hair. and as i watched the water ripple under the bicycles and skateboards and feet pounding across the bridge, i thought: you know. i wasn’t going to do it anyway. i wasn’t really going to do it.